Trying to help my son diagnose a problem with his 2001 Camaro. He just drove it 1000 miles (from St. Louis to Virginia Beach) two days ago. He said that about an hour from his destination (about 14 hours into the trip), his transmission started slipping. It has 130K miles and has been well taken care of. I noticed when we bought it that occasionally when I back it out of the driveway into the street and pulled the shifter into OD, it would sometimes slip. As soon as I pulled it down into 1st, it took off fine and then I would slide the shifter back to OD and all was fine. He says the problem is only occuring in OD. He can drive it, but he is now manually shifting, avoiding overdrive and not doing any highway driving.

Is this the first signs of a dying trans, or might there be something less than a complete rebuild that will cure this problem? Thanks in advance for your help.

-Dan

 

May want to check out the shift linkage, before blaming the transmission.

 

You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out what happened to cause an issue with a automatic trans. Was it a seal, was it low fluid. Slipping hot is a sign of clutch slippage. slipping cold is normally seals. If either happens more then a few times on a 100K trans what caused the issue is not real important, the fix is most likely a rebuild.

It kind of sounds like you had seal leak internally cold now your clutch packs are giving up. The seal repair is a rebuild also so driving it did not really hurt anything. Over 100K you into a full master kit rebuild anyway.

FYI Automatic transmission rebuild at 130K is considered by GM as normal wear.